Verizon DSL (and other PPPoE net providers)

[Mike]

Greetings all,
Being a previous tech for Sprint DSL I've got a little bit of general
info for most DSL subscribers.

Many DSL providers use PPPoE (Point to point protocol over Ethernet) to
authenticate their subscribers. To ease up on customers having to use a
connection box similar to dialup every time they want to get online,
modems in the last 2 or so years have built in PPPoE that stores your
username and password within the firmware. When you open any program
that sends a request to the net, the modem throws the user/pass in front
of that request. Depending on the company you have, your modem may stay
automatically logged in anywhere from 5-30 or so minutes. Logging you
off their network helps the ISP reuse IP addys along with lowering
network usage in general. This though has been known to cause problems
with older modems that want you to log in using a prompt on the PC as
the computer doesn't always sent the user/pass after the first time.

The modems used with Sprint are by a company called Zyxel. They use the
645 series modem currently, which are "routed modems" that also have
bridge capability for use with a home router (linksys, Dlink, etc..) and
even include a basic firewall.

Most DSL modems that are in routed mode only hand out one IP address as
the companies want you to pay for more addys each month. One nice way
around this would be to use a home router, and bridge the modem.
(Bridging the modem turns off ALL routing functions, NAT, and the
firewall and pass everything, including the public routable IP addy
directly to whatever computer/router you have connected to it.

In Sprint's case when the modem is in it's typical routed mode (one
computer connected direct to modem through a cross over cable) the modem
has NAT, authentication, and the firewall turned on. This also makes the
modem the "gateway" and a basic DNS and IP addy server for the computer
to see.

You can hard code the default IP address and DNS info that the modem
gives out (get this info from your ISP) into the computer's NIC (Network
card) if you don't trust that the modem will give it to the computer
correctly on load. In my Sprint example the Zyxel modems (gateway) addy
is 192.168.1.1 and the computer is given 192.168.1.2 along with DNS info
that hardly ever changes.

Now if you have a home router (wireless or wired) throw all that out the
window. :)

With many providers including Sprint, the routed modem they give you
will butt heads with the router you buy and nothing happens. This can be
due to double NAT (Network address translation) This is when the public
IP address from the modem is changed to a 192.168 address (as an
example) then it goes through your home router, it's changed again to
either another 192.168 address or the same one again, then goes to the
computer. This typically kills if not slows down your connection. To get
around this, you can bridge your modem (Sprint has instructions at
http://www.sprintdslhelp.com) and that will pass the public address from
the phone line through the modem, so it gets to the home router. Your
home router never sees the modem along the path. The only thing you then
have to do would be to set the router for PPPoE (so it can send the
username and password since the modem has been silenced) put in your
user/pass (many times it's your email address and password, but can be a
number of things, then test the connection.

When hooking up windows or linux boxes, you may only then have to set
your nic for the gateway (the router's address) IP address that the
router wants to give out, and DNS. You can also use the router's built
in DHCP server to set everything for your computer.

Hopefully that is a little info for people new to PPPoE wanting to set
up their box, or network for the first time.

Mike Rosati
Senior something or other...
www.mikes-website.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Burger [mailto:mburger at bubbanfriends.org] 
Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 10:33 AM
To: For users of Fedora Core releases
Subject: Re: Verizon DSL

On Mon, 6 Sep 2004, Robert wrote:

> Mike Burger wrote:
> > On Sun, 5 Sep 2004, Travis Fraser wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >>On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 21:09, Jeff Vian wrote:
> >>
> >>>On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 16:12, Travis Fraser wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 14:34, Mike Burger wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>>On Sun, 5 Sep 2004, Austin Isler wrote:
> 
> <snip....>
> > 
> > One doesn't do DDNS specifically to the computer, in this case.
They do 
> > DDNS to the IP.  They can run a DDNS client on the computer, itself.
> 
> I've been lurking, waiting for all combatants to agree on the fact
that 
> Verizon does indeed want to know who's connected where. (shakes head)
> What I would like to know is, does Verizon have POP mail access or are

> users limited to &^$* web mail access?

Oh, no...Verizon does SMTP and POP to their verizon.net mailboxes.
-- 
Mike Burger
http://www.bubbanfriends.org

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